I was doing some research on Russian homophobia when I came across this article by Olga Khazan of The Atlantic in which Elizabeth Wood, a professor of history at MIT, presents a theory on why Russia has become so extremely hostile towards gay people:

While there is plenty of homophobia in Russia, I think the Soviet state continued the Tsarist Orthodox state’s direction of being a moral and tutelary state—the continuity of state influence over moral choices never died away. Hence it is relatively easy for the post-Soviet state to return to Soviet-style regulation. And since the Soviet state and now, even more, the Russian state is built on oppositions of us versus them, it is easy for the authorities to say “we” are x, not y. Homosexuality makes an easy “y,” alas.

In case you’ve missed the severity of the human-rights violations in Russia, Pink News listed the twenty-five most shocking anti-gay stories from Russia until February 2014:

1. Gay club attacked with “harmful gas” by unknown assailants
2. Gay dating app blocked, users threatened with arrest
3. Three men sentenced for stabbing and setting alight man they believed was gay
4. Newspaper editor fined under anti-gay law for printing “being gay is normal”
5. Tortured and killed gay man “raped with beer bottles”
6. The Russian gangs who hunt gay people for sport
7. Police colluded with Neo-Nazis at 2011 Moscow Pride protests
8. Russian MP calls for law allowing gays to be whipped in public squares
9. Russian paratroopers violently attacked lone gay rights activist in St Petersburg
10. Father imprisoned gay teen son in rehab clinic after a witch failed to exorcise his homosexuality
11. Angry crowd of fascists violently attack gay activists in Voronezh
12. Russian lawmaker tells Stephen Fry: “Gay teens pretend to be bullied”
13. Thirty arrests made at 2013 Moscow Pride
14. Four Dutch filmmakers questioned by police over “gay propaganda”
15. Peter Tatchell punched in the face at 2007 Moscow Pride
16. Survey reveals 51% of population would not “under any circumstances” want a gay neighbour or work colleague
17. Russian viral video claims gay couples adopt children to rape them
18. Middle school girl accused of spreading “gay propaganda” placed under supervision
19. Prosecutors investigate to find out if children’s library book contains gay “propaganda”
20. Activist campaigning against “police state” arrested after stapling testicles to cobblestone
21. Violence and arrests at 2009 Pride alongside Eurovision
22. Orthodox priest who supported pro-LGBT Pussy Riot found stabbed to death
23. Woman charged under anti-gay law over social network page
24. Gay pride march organiser beaten after city announces ban
25. Vladimir Putin signs “gay propaganda” and same-sex adoption bans into law

Image: The pink triangle was the symbol gay men were forced to wear in Nazi Germany.

I visited the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen yesterday. Amongst the many artworks in its huge collection, I was the most fascinated by the large number of big altarpieces from the 15th century. The one seen above was made in Germany in 1425 for Boeslunde Church in south-western Zealand.

In City Journal, Michael J. Totten writes about Chris Kyle, the hero in Clint Eastwood’s new film, American Sniper:

In American Sniper, we see him [Chris Kyle] in Fallujah and Ramadi fighting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, the bloody precursor to ISIS. His immediate nemesis is “the Butcher,” a fictional character whose favorite weapon is a power drill. The Butcher confronts an Iraqi family who spoke to Americans and says “if you talk to them, you die with them.” He tortures their child to death with his drill.

Kyle kills a kid, too, but in a radically different context. The boy is running toward Americans with a live grenade in his hand. “They’ll fry you if you’re wrong,” his spotter tells him. “They’ll send you to Leavenworth.” He’s right. Kyle would have been fried, at least figuratively, if he shot an innocent, unarmed civilian—regardless of age—with premeditation. In a later scene, he has another child in his sights: the child picks up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and aims it at an American Humvee. “Drop it,” Kyle says under his breath from far away. He doesn’t want to pull that trigger. He’ll shoot if he must to protect the lives of his fellow Americans, but the kid drops the RPG and Kyle slumps in relief. How different he is from the Butcher, who takes sadistic pleasure in torturing children to death—not even children of the American invaders, but Iraqi children.

Parents in these schools are submitting a form called a “personal belief exemption”, which states that they are not vaccinating their kids due to “a diffuse constellation of unproven anxieties, from allergies and asthma to eczema and seizures”, Olga Khazan of The Atlantic reports. This suspicion of vaccination has, amongst other things, resulted in a record number of measles cases in California.

“Hungary is quickly losing the defining features of a democracy under the rule of law,” Heather Grabbe, director of EU affairs in Brussels for the Open Society Foundations, says in this article by Ian Traynor of the Guardian.

This Special Report about Jobbik by Reuters’s Marcin Goettig and Christian Lowe is nearly a year old, but it’s still an essential read. But be warned, it is a frightening read.

Brian Whitaker of the Guardian writes:

As far as many of the Arab public are concerned, discriminating against members of the “wrong” faith, or those who hold unorthodox views, is not only acceptable, but the right thing to do. For Arab governments, enforcing religious rules and allying themselves with God helps to make up for their lack of electoral legitimacy.

This causes a particular problem in combating the ideology of groups such as Isis because most Arab states—including several members of the military coalition against it—share Isis’s approach to compulsion in religion. Isis may be more brutal in practice but, basically, they are on the same ground—asserting the superiority of Islam and the legitimacy of religious discrimination.

A writer on Islam has proposed that a Lockean spirit of freedom is exactly the corrective influence that the Muslim world badly needs, The Economist reports. It’s a compelling thought.

Three stories of anti-Semitism has bothered me today:

• Ukrainian rebel leader says miserable Jews lead country, Haaretz reports.
• A job advertisement that says “Not for Jews” has upset France, France 24 reports.
• British neo-Nazi group is planning a rally against the “Jewification of Great Britain”, Jerusalem Post reports.

In a Swedish-language article—that I hope you are able to run through a translator—Ingmar Nevéus of Dagens Nyheter interviews two Russians who are employed by the state to post the Putin regime’s propaganda and disinformation on the Internet. They spend their days writing comments to articles on Western newspaper articles and blog entries. It is their job to make you think that maybe, just maybe, Putin is misunderstood by America and Europe, that his annexation of Crimea was justified, that the real aggressor in Ukraine is the Kiev government, and that no such thing as state-sponsored homophobia and xenophobia exists in Russia.

Image: A book illustration from 1915 by John Bauer.

“The Russian architect of the ‘gay propaganda’ bill has hit back at the women who took a selfie with him in the background,” Naith Payton of Pink News reports.

The senator in question is Vitaly Milonov, who is famous for being a nutty homophobe and anti-Semite. Had it not been for the fact that he has real political influence in Russia, he would be a hilarious stereotype. To illustrate this man’s phobias, I quote Wikipedia’s entry on him:

In 2013, Milonov stated that gay athletes could be subject to arrest at the Sochi Olympics, if promoting homosexuality to minors. He stated, “If a law has been approved by the federal legislature and signed by the president, then the government has no right to suspend it. It doesn’t have the authority.” Milonov also protested the Side by Side LGBT film festival in November 2013.

On October 30, 2014, Milonov spoke out about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s homosexuality and said on the FlashNord website: “What could he bring us? The Ebola virus, AIDS, gonorrhea? They all have unseemly ties over there.”

On March 19, 2014, Milonov reportedly made anti-Semitic statements to St. Petersburg legislative council. According to the svodka.net news website, Milonov stated that Jews “vilify any saint, it is in their tradition of 2,000 years, beginning with the appeals to crucify the Savior, ending with accusations of anti-Semitism against St. John of Kronstadt.” Regarding allegations that St. John of Kronstadt, a 19th-century religious leader, was a supporter of the Black Hundred, Milonov argued that this allegation was based on “complete lies, a modern neo-liberal fable with a sulfuric, deep history of Satanism.”

Below is a video clip from BBC showing Stephen Fry trying to reason with this Russian man, which is a bit like trying to talk a pig into good table manners.

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“The fact that science opens a window for us to peer into our deep past should be a cause for celebration,” Marcelo Gleiser writes in an article on the things we know about the early universe. It’s fascinating stuff.

I’m leaving for Berlin in a short while. Tomorrow evening, I will visit the Deutsche Oper Berlin and enjoy Richard Strauss’s Elektra, one of my absolute favourite operas.

Cast
Conductor	Donald Runnicles
Director	Kirsten Harms
Klytämnestra	Waltraud Meier
Elektra	Catherine Foster
Chrysothemis	Manuela Uhl
Aegisth	Reiner Goldberg
Orest	Tobias Kehrer

“The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever,” Christopher Booker of the Telegraph reports.

As I wrote on Friday, I have spent the weekend in Berlin and then visited Deutsche Oper to see Elektra. It was a truly spectacular performance by top performers. Photography wasn’t allowed, but I took this one during the massive round of applause.

A mere 0.2 per cent of Europeans are Jewish, Ethan Epstein of The Weekly Standard reports.

One reason to love Berlin is the liberal attitude towards its fetish scene. In many other parts if the world, the fetish subculture would exist in hidden backstreets only, but in Berlin, it’s on display. This advertisement is in front of the entrance to the Nollendorfplatz metro station.

“Around 100 prehistoric ‘cult sites,’ containing phallic carvings have been found in the Eilat Mountains in the Negev Desert in Israel,” Mark Prigg of the Daily Mail reports. “The sites date back around 8,000 years, and archaeologists were stunned to find a variety of stone structures and artifacts.”

One of the stars of one of Russia’s biggest sitcoms has come out as gay, Nick Duffy of Pink News reports. By coming out in one of the most homophobic countries on the planet, he is risking his career—and his life.

Danish police confirm that one person has died after shots were fired at a meeting attended by controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks, The Local reports.

“People who cannot work because they are overweight or suffering addiction problems could be threatened with losing their sickness benefits if they do not accept treatment under plans due to be outlined by David Cameron,” Rowena Mason of the Guardian reports.

It’s too early to tell who has done it, but it follows the same pattern as the terrorist attack in Paris recently. Then a first attack on free speech was followed by an attack on a Jewish shop.

As always in contemporary anti-Semitism, the signatures of this pledge hide behind a thin layer of anti-Israel rhetoric:

We support the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality. In response to the call from Palestinian artists and cultural workers for a cultural boycott of Israel, we pledge to accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.

This is nonsense. If any one side in this conflict should be criticised for its human-rights violations, it’s Hamas, not Israel. Hamas fires tens of thousands of rocket into Israel and has committed itself to kill all Jews. But although no Israeli party has genocide in its manifesto, these British artists have chosen to boycott Israel and the Jewish people. These Brits even have the audacity to accuse Israel of illegal colonisation. Israel is the Jewish homeland and has been so for thousands of years. This is very different from British colonisation, which used to terrorise one-fifth of the world and still is present in Belfast, where walls have been built that keep Irishmen and Englishmen apart. This oppression of the Irish cannot be blamed on the Jews, so the artists now masking themselves as human-rights activists couldn’t care less.

Image: By Robin Kirk. On Flickr, Kirk writes, “The wall between the Shankill and the Falls is one of the most visitied in Belfast, but it is only one among more than 80 ‘peace walls’.”

Police in Copenhagen have shot the man who they believe opened fire and killed two at a cafe and a synagogue, The Local reports.

“France’s interior minister said Sunday several hundred tombs had been defaced at a Jewish cemetery in the northeast of the country,” Pauline Talagrand and Julien Sengel of AFP reports.

“You can’t live with a constant threat of being physically attacked and verbally abused and you can’t live with the necessity of having soldiers and security guards guarding every Jewish institution,” Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organisation of America, says. He now believes that there is no future for Jews in Europe.

I refuse to think that Klein is right. Europe has a serious problem with anti-Semitism, but moving to Israel should still be considered an option and not a necessity. Besides, there is also a trend amongst young Israelis that involves moving to Europe. I realise that I might be wildly optimistic, but in my vision of the future, Jews in both Israel and Europe will feel free to move about without fear of terrorism and racism.

“Plans have been drawn up for a ‘leather-themed’ plaza at the heart of one of San Francisco’s gay districts,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports. “The plaza would recognise the area’s ties to the local gay and leather communities, with the floor themed after the black, blue, white and red of the Leather Pride flag.”

Image: The Leather Pride flag, designed by Tony DeBlase in 1989.

“She has dominated the airwaves during 30 years as a chart-topper, but now Radio 1 has decided that Madonna is an immaterial girl and just too old for its teenage listeners,” Chris Hastings of the Daily Mail reports. Ageism is an ugly thing!

A journalist who wanted to see what it’s like to be a Jew in Paris put on a kippah for an hour and experienced anti-Semitism as he walked the streets, Khaleda Rahman of the Daily Mail reports.

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According to new directives, police officers guarding Jewish buildings in Sweden should now carry automatic rifles, The Local reports. I don’t know what I feel about the sight of heavily armed policemen guarding my synagogue. It’s great that they take the threat to Swedish Jews seriously, but it’s a worrying reminder of the violent hatred against us Jews. It also bothers me that a small minority of Muslim thugs have hijacked Islam and turned an entire religion into a perceived threat to our civil liberties.

At this large memorial in the centre of Berlin, a signboard reads:

In august 1988, the journalist Lea Rosh and the historian Eberhard Jäckel made a public proposal for establishing a “highly visible memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe” in Berlin. On 25 June 1999, after long and drawn-out debates, the German Bundestag finally passed a resolution to build a “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” based on the design by the New York architect. Peter Eisenman. On 10 May 2005, the Holocaust Memorial—comprising 2,711 concrete stelae and a subterranean Information Centre—was officially opened to the public.

Only a few metres from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is, the much smaller Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism. A signboard at this memorial reads:

In Nazi Germany, homosexuality was persecuted ta a degree unprecedented in history. In 1935, the National Socialists issued an order making all male homosexuality a crime; the provisions governing homosexual behaviour in Section 175 of the Criminal Code were significantly expanded and made stricter. A kiss was enough reason to prosecute. There were more than 50,000 convictions. Under Section 175, the punishment was imprisonment; in some case, convicted offenders were castrated. Thousand of men were sent to concentration camps for being gay; man of them died there. They died of hunger, disease and abuse or were the victims of targeted killings.

This memorial was designed by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset and opened on 27 May 2008. The most moving part of the monument is a short film of two kissing men, which can be seen through a small window. I corresponds well to the signboard and it reminded me of all those homophobes who still make excuses for violence and oppression of gay man and, like the Nazis, assumes that their homophobia is a natural and biological in origin.

Last week, France 24 paid a visit to Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave on the north coast of Africa that is quickly becoming known as the jihadi capital of Europe, Barbie Latza Nadeau of The Daily Beast reports.

Watch the video below.

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Batya Ungar-Sargon has written an interesting article on ultra-Orthodox Jews who are closeted atheists.

“A doctor has refused to treat a 4-month-old child, saying her religion had prevented her from being able to, because the parents are gay,” Joseph Patrick McCormick of Pink News reports.

“Mikhail Gallatinov, 40, and Marc Goodwin, 31, are both currently serving life sentences for murder at the maximum-security HM Prison Full Sutton,” in Yorkshire, Nick Duffy of Pink News reports. “Gallatinov was jailed in 1997 for murdering 28-year-old Adrian Kaminsky. Goodwin was jailed in 2007, for the murder of Malcolm Benfold, 57.”

I wonder how many hours it will take the homophobes to make this an example of how the “homosexual lifestyle” is really about murder and violence. That’s how they normally act—they take one extreme example and make it apply to the general gay population.

The Fox News contributor Erick Erickson has written a column comparing the gay-rights movement to the Islamic State terror group, Joseph Patrick McCormick of Pink News reports.

There really is no moral in homophobes like Erickson. The Islamic State kills gay people by throwing them off rooftops, and this hater has the audacity to make comparison between peaceful demands for equality and this terrorist group. F**king a-hole!

Image: From one of the Islamic State’s Twitter accounts.

“The United States Supreme Court is expected to decide this year whether states can prohibit same-sex marriages, a move with the potential to lead to the legalisation of gay unions in all 50 states,” Julie Turkewitz of the New York Times writes. “But the ruling would not apply to the Navajo Nation, because the country’s 556 tribes are sovereign entities.”

“Former Saturday Night Live actress-turned Tea Party activist Victoria Jackson has claimed that Barack Obama is an ‘Islamic jihadist’ who supports same-sex marriage,” Nick Duffy of Pink News writes.

It’s hard to comprehend how stupid some people really are.

“Researchers from Cambridge University have found that it is possible to make a baby using the skin cells of parents of the same sex,” Molly Rose Pike of Pink News reports. Cool!

“A daily pill can effectively protect gay men against infection with HIV, a UK trial has shown, which experts say now offers hope of reversing the virus’s spread,” Sarah Boseley of the Guardian reports.

“Anti-Semitism on college campuses is growing, with more than half of Jewish students claiming they have witnessed or been subjected to some form of anti-Jewish harassment, according to a new report by a leading human rights organisation,” Adam Kredo of Washington Free Beacon reports.

“Iran’s Revolutionary Guard launches a large-scale naval and air defence drill near a strategic Gulf waterway, during which a replica of a US aircraft carrier is used as a target,” Robert Midgley of the Telegraph reports.

Russia and Iran make the world more dangerous.

“The American Family Association has published a map directing people to the offices of LGBT charities—branding them ‘anti-Christian bigots’,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

In its map, the American Family Association lists civil-liberty organisations as bigoted groups because they are “bullying American corporations to embrace sexual perversion”. To be in favour of respect and equality equates bigotry in this wonderful newspeak.

I feel sorry for the large majority of American Christians who are sane and consider love and liberty true virtues.

“Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off,” Ian Sample of the Guardian reports. “Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in Maryland this June.”

Today, spring arrived to Malmö. On my way home after a meeting, I took this photo of the blue sky and Turning Torso, the city’s tallest building and a landmark.

From The Economist’s review of Thomas Flynn’s new book on Jean-Paul Sartre:

The human mind was free, notably in its imaginative capacity to entertain possibilities and think of the world as different from how it was. People were free of religious or ethical authorities, so obliged to find their own values. They were free finally to define themselves or choose a form of life as they pleased, for there was no human nature—nothing essential, that is—to being human. Those three freedoms added up to “existentialism”, an otherwise obscure label by which Sartre’s thought became known.

And:

In a typical twist, Sartre added that people were entirely free to reject the verdicts of others and their stereotyping. To deny that freedom involved self-deception or bad faith. So, generally, did blaming your situation on your past, your parents, the unconscious, social pressures or human nature. Those were craven excuses. At any moment you could avow or disavow your situation. Strictly, it was yours only once you claimed ownership. Such freedom was daunting, Sartre recognised. In his brutal phrase, everyone was “condemned” to be free.

I love Sartre!

In a landmark ruling, Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals has declared that saying “I don’t love you” to a spouse amounted to emotional violence and ordered a husband to pay compensation to his wife in a divorce case, the Daily Sabah reports.